Iris Murdoch
17 quotations
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.